Art at the Edge

2026

Shirley Chisholm State Park

July 25, 2026 - September 30, 2026

LITTORAL / LITORAL (2026) A Tidal Atlas for Coastal Resilience in Jamaica Bay is a public art project by Camila A. Morales (Valé) that transforms the planters at Shirley Chisholm State Park into a visual field guide about flooding, coastal resilience, ecology, and marine life in Jamaica Bay.

Spanning 30 planters across Hendrix Creek Road and Penn Pier, the installation explores the environmental systems of earth, water, and sky through large-scale graphics, ecological storytelling, and augmented reality. Inspired by marsh landscapes, migratory species, tidal rhythms, and community experiences of living with water, the project invites visitors to reflect on the changing shoreline and the interconnected relationships between people, infrastructure, and coastal ecosystems.

Art at the Water’s Edge

Climate art helps us understand the world around us in ways that facts and data alone cannot. It makes complex issues personal, transforms lived experiences into stories, and creates space for reflection, conversation, and action. Waterfront Alliance’s Art at the Edge program brings artists and communities together to tell the stories of our waterways through intentional, thought-provoking art. By exploring the connections between people, place, and water, the program elevates perspectives that have too often been overlooked or underrepresented, creating space to reflect on the past, engage with the present, and imagine a future with equitable waterfronts shaped through collective action.

Where Art Meets Action

Waterfront Alliance believes the stories we tell about our waterways matter. As an alliance of more than 1,100 organizations and individuals, we bring people together around their shared future. Art at the Edge extends that work by creating space for artists and communities to share their stories, shift perspectives, and inspire action.

Launched in 2020 with support from the South Street Seaport Museum and The Seaport, Art at the Edge has grown into a Waterfront Alliance initiative supported by a broad community of artists, partners, funders, and friends. Through each iteration, the program continues to explore the power of intentional art to connect people to the waterways around them and to the future they can help shape.

2026
Shirley Chisholm State Park
July 25, 2026 - September 30, 2026
"LITTORAL / LITORAL" (2026) by Camila A. Morales
A Tidal Atlas for Coastal Resilience in Jamaica Bay

LITTORAL / LITORAL is a public art project by Camila A. Morales (Valé) that transforms the planters at Shirley Chisholm State Park into a visual field guide about flooding, coastal resilience, ecology, and marine life in Jamaica Bay.

Spanning 30 planters across Hendrix Creek Road and Penn Pier, the installation explores the environmental systems of earth, water, and sky through large-scale graphics, ecological storytelling, and augmented reality. Inspired by marsh landscapes, migratory species, tidal rhythms, and community experiences of living with water, the project invites visitors to reflect on the changing shoreline and the interconnected relationships between people, infrastructure, and coastal ecosystems.

LITTORAL / LITORAL was developed through Submerse NY, a statewide initiative of the New York State Water Resources Institute at Cornell University, and was made possible with support from FEMA’s Cooperating Technical Partners (CTP) program and the Waterfront Alliance, which led the artist call, provided funding, and coordinated the project. New York State Parks owns and manages Shirley Chisholm State Park, supported the artist through installation, and offers related programming at the site. New York Sea Grant coordinated the local steering committee and provided knowledge support throughout the project. This work was shaped by a steering committee of community-based organizations and engaged residents whose voices and expertise helped guide the artwork.
Camila A. Morales is a Latinx interdisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and founder of Valé in Far Rockaway, New York. Working at the intersection of art, ecology, architecture, and new media, her practice explores relationships between coastal environments, community, and storytelling through immersive installations, sound, public art, and participatory design. Rooted in her experience as a Chilean-Canadian immigrant, her work centers on place, belonging, environmental stewardship, and climate justice.

With over 15 years of experience across architecture and the arts, Morales has contributed to cultural and public projects including the Barack Obama Presidential Library Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the Smith College Library. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and leads the Valé EcoLab, a community space focused on environmental literacy, youth engagement, and creative approaches to coastal resilience in the Rockaways.
2024
Pier 16/South Street Seaport Museum, The Seaport, Manhattan
September 22, 2024 - October 5, 2024
"Shadows at the Waters Edge" (2024) by Singha Hon, Denise Zhou
“Shadows at the Water’s Edge” is a collection of windows into what was, and what could be, in the area we know today as the Seaport. Draped along the railings of Pier 16, haunting, speculative storytelling elements stitch together layers of colonial and capitalist violence that have amassed to lay waste to air, water, and land. Shadows invites passersby to contend with the necessity of reorienting our relationship to the natural world—severing ourselves from exploitation, ownership, and profit, and inviting collective responsibility, interconnectedness, and repair.

Illustration panels draw together a menagerie of animals and plants whose populations and histories intertwine with the Seaport’s ecological landscape. In the air, an amimi passenger pigeon soars next to the dickcissel and spotted sandpiper, while a migrating double-crested cormorant dives into the water. In the water, animals whose ecosystem has been altered by pollution, overfishing, and other destructive habitat behaviors are shown instead thriving: menhaden—often considered one of the most important fish in the sea—sturgeon, bluefish, quahogs, mussels, and more. Along the shore and climbing to land is the diamondback terrapin, a species of turtle almost hunted to extinction, looking up to an abundant landscape populated with seaside goldenrod, wake robin, and white oak.
Credit: Marion Aguas
Singha Hon is an artist, educator, and illustrator born and raised in New York City. She studied at Bates College, receiving a B.A. in arts and visual culture and a B.A. in theater. She was the fourth artist-in- residence at the W.O.W. Project in 2019 and continued to work with them through the Creatives Rebuild Artist Employment Program through 2022 to 2024.

As an artist and illustrator, she has created work for organizations such as the ACLU, the People’s Paper Co-Op, MoMA, Womanly magazine, and O+ Positive. She has created murals and large-scale public art pieces which you can find in Kingston, N.Y. and in downtown NYC.

As an educator, she has taught at organizations including the W.O.W. Project as well as Abrons Arts Center, leading intergenerational workshops on subjects ranging from ceramics, cyanotype, portraiture, and mask making.

Through painting, illustration, and sculpture, she is interested in exploring the human-animal relationship, and how the way we think about and connect to the natural world can inform how we feel about our community and ourselves.

https://www.singhahon.com/
Instagram: @Singha.Hon

Credit: Marion Aguas
Denise Zhou is a cultural worker based in Brooklyn, New York, activating storytelling for political education, youth, and community power, and a reclamation of a people’s culture. Their work, which spans writing, film, sculpture, print, and public programming, engages with the transformation of relationships through grief, the balance of self with the collective, and possibilities of future. Her projects have been presented at Tribeca Film Institute, Brooklyn Museum, Green-Wood Cemetery, and community events across New York City.

“Shadows at the Edge” is Singha and Denise’s third collaboration, following their work together at the W.O.W. Project, where they created “High Tide,” a speculative play set in a futuristic Manhattan Chinatown post sea-level rise, and “Have You Heard of the Megajail in Chinatown?,” a one-page risograph zine that unravels the history of the land on which a violent carceral facility has existed for nearly 200 years.

Website: https://dzhou.carrd.co/
"Tide" (2024) by Michael Krondl
Digital print on vinyl
7.5 X 110 feet

The subject of Krondl’s work is our troubled relationship with the natural world, as a society and as individuals. Many of his pieces have referenced the consequences of the climate emergency, primarily focusing on the impact of water and drought.

“Tide” interjects a (virtual) tear or crevice into the center of Pier 16, so that the East River seems to be bubbling up and over the surface of the dock—as it undoubtedly will with rising sea levels. Viewers will be put into a situation of having to cross this break in time, this snapshot of the future, to physically participate with the artwork.

While the work clearly addresses the climate crisis, Krondl is less interested in eliciting a rational, reasoned response from the audience. Instead, he is looking for a personal, physical—even visceral— reaction from the viewer that bypasses higher intellectual functions and goes directly for the midbrain. Which is not to say that an intellectual train of thought can’t follow; the intent is to create an intersection of the somatic and the conceptual where human frailty isn’t merely theory but a potential and immediate danger.
Credit: Hratch Arbach
Michael Krondl is a Czech-born, New York-based installation artist. His site-specific pieces typically use photographs of fragments of nature or the local environment. These are then manipulated (though both digital and analog means) to create very large-scale images and, in turn, mounted on walls, billboards, screens and even floors in such a way that they transform space and architecture. Many of his works focus on environmental issues and the climate emergency.

His work has been exhibited at both private and public galleries in Canada, Czech Republic, Germany the Netherlands as well as the United States. He has also exhibited his installation pieces in numerous public venues, including the Palmovka Synagogue in Prague, Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Art Omi and the Katonah Museum in upstate New York, Colorado Springs and others. His permanent public artwork can be seen in the New York City Subway, Surrey (British Columbia), Greenville-Spartanburg Airport and Vail, Colorado.

Krondl is a recipient of many grants, most recently a Canada Council grant to explore rising sea levels in Nova Scotia. He is a graduate of the Cooper Union (BFA) and the CUNY Graduate Center (MLS).

https://art.michaelkrondl.net/
Instagram: @mkrondl
"Anxiety Tower" (2024) by Sari Nordman
A fiber-arts installation, Anxiety Tower discusses the problems of single-use plastics. The tapestries in the installation are made using recycled plastic film, some of them communally-made. The project seeks to elevate public awareness of the single-use plastics problem, advocate for people to minimize their use, and consider creative recycling and repurposing solutions.

The title anxiety refers to eco-anxiety addressing humanity’s ability to invent durable and inexpensive products that can serve many in multiple ways, as well as its inability to utilize a product’s full lifecycle thus burdening nature, waterways and people. The title also refers to the calming, positive effects of fiber-arts making. The hand crafts process is slow and steady, and becomes meditative. Anxieties subside and are interwoven with the tapestries.
Sari Nordman, a Finnish interdisciplinary artist and educator, creates public art projects, video works and dance performances. Many of her projects have been informed by climate change and respond to environmental social justice issues. To amplify diverse voices from around the world her projects often involve social engagement. She engages people through interview processes, photography and fiber- arts making.

She has exhibited her works for Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (Jamaica Flux) and King Manor Museum, and with Shared Dialogue, Shared Space (SDSS,) New York. She is a recipient of awards from Brooklyn Arts Council, Finlandia Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts. She has discussed her projects, and the environmentalism and social engagement in her process in panels at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC. She holds an M.F.A. from NYU/Tisch School of the Arts.

Sarinordman.com
Instagram: @sarinordman
LinkedIn: Sarinordman
YouTube
Facebook: sari.nordman
2023
July 16, 2023 - July 30, 2023
"Photoville: Art at the Edge" (2023) by Jeremy Dennis, Nicole Vergalla
Waterfront Alliance harnesses the power of the creative arts to call attention to the dangers of sea level rise and the urgent need for greater coastal resilience. This free outdoor art exhibit, Art at the Edge, in the Seaport (Pier 16/South Street Seaport Museum), captures New York and New Jersey artists whose work is thematically tied to climate change to inspire, inform, and engage the public about the urgency of the climate crisis. Visitors will have the opportunity to absorb art focused on the climate crisis, including the intersecting themes of coastal resilience, waterfront access, and the region’s maritime culture and history.

The exhibit features two photographic exhibitions: On This Site by Jeremy Dennis and Gowanus Dredgers by Nicole Vergalla.
Jeremy Dennis’ goal is to preserve and create awareness of sacred, culturally significant, and historical Native American landscapes on Long Island, New York. Through curiosity about his own origin and ancestral history, Dennis gathers and combines archaeological, anthropological, historical, and oral stories to answer essential cultural defining questions: Where did my ancestors live? Why did they choose these places? What happened to them over time? Do these places still exist? To seek the answers to his questions, Dennis researches, visits, and photographs each site, documenting the change in each landscape and highlighting the everlasting connection between place and memory. As a revelation, these sites remain but were made invisible.

Nicole Vergalla’s photographs are part of her “Gowanus Dredgers” collection—shot in and around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. She writes, “I began to take photographs of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club in 2017 after coming across their annual fundraising race. My wanderings in the city began to focus more and more on the canal and its surrounding areas. I was fascinated by the dual essence of the Gowanus—a Superfund site, with a history marked by neglect and abuse, entwined with recreation, wildlife and joy. As I got more involved with the Dredgers I came to love and really embrace their mission to get the public active and engaged in our local waterways. When people see the City from the water, it changes their perspective. They notice wild pockets at dead end streets, they see how sewer overflows impact the quality of the water, they observe wildlife surviving and even thriving in surprising places. I believe that by encouraging people to actively engage with our waterfront, we create future stewards and advocates for the ecosystem we all share.”
"Oyster Party" (2023) by Natalie Collette Wood
Natalie Collette Wood, who presents Oyster Party, an outdoor assemblage sculpture gathering together natural and found objects, especially oysters shells. The sculpture suggests how these craggy creatures remain ready to reclaim the seascape and perform their vital functions, if only we could allow it. Created with natural and found objects the work would celebrate the magical powers of oysters and their enormous stewardship to our environment and waterways. Natalie is a multidisciplinary artist whose solo exhibitions include “Splendour” at Freight + Volume Gallery in New York City (2019); “Natural Phenomenon” at Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx; “Nothing Lasts Forever” at the Andrew Freedman Home (2016), and “Futuristic Fossil” at Chashama, N.Y. (2016). Her work has also been included in exhibitions such as the AIM Biannual: Bronx Calling at the Bronx Museum of Art, Ornamenting Crime at Zürcher Gallery in New York City, and the Hot House at Kathryn Markel Fine Art in Chelsea. Natalie’s work has also been featured in Vogue Italia, FLAUNT Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Record, and the New York Times.
Natalie Collette Wood is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in The Bronx, NY. She holds an MFA from Lehman College and a BFA from the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include Nesting at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum (2025), Buttermilk at Governors Island (2023), Splendour at Freight + Volume Gallery (2019), Natural Phenomenon at the Andrew Freedman Home, Bronx, NY (2018), and Nothing Lasts Forever at the Andrew Freedman Home (2016). Wood’s work has been featured in major group exhibitions, including The AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Ornamenting Crime at Zürcher Gallery, and The Hot House at Kathryn Markel Fine Art in Chelsea. Her work has also been highlighted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, and FLAUNT Magazine.
2022
July 17, 2022 - August 21, 2022
"Tomorrow’s Sea" (2022) by Edrex Fontanilla, Sarah Nelson Wright
Sarah Nelson Wright & Edrex Fontanilla’s Tomorrow’s Sea is an interactive media sculpture with a virtual reality viewer that uses the metaphor of a telescope to transport viewers to five NYC shorelines threatened by climate change and rising sea levels. The wooden viewer, designed to evoke maritime history and wooden boats, rotates 360 degrees to reveal panoramic views and soundscapes created from field recordings by the artists. Taking the perspective of the landscape, the videos will immerse the viewer in the wild postindustrial green spaces and urban vistas of five endangered shorelines in New York City that may be underwater due to sea level rise by 2100. By inviting viewers to observe and appreciate these places, the artists hope to inspire a meditation on both the resilience of nature and the urgent need for action on climate change.
Edrex Fontanilla is an experimental filmmaker and new media artist whose creative practice fuses sculptural and computational methods to explore perception, materiality, and temporality. He researches how the study of human psychology and cognition can inform approaches in experimental media. With an orientation towards socially responsible expression, Fontanilla is committed to a reflective teaching practice that enables young minds to develop their voice.

Sarah Nelson Wright is a Brooklyn based artist and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates media projects about the urban experience that explore the changing city and investigate avenues for intervention. Her work encompasses video, installation, interactive media, and public art.

Her projects have been exhibited internationally in galleries and festivals, including the Queens Museum (NY), Staten Island Museum (NY), Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (NY), Hearst Museum of Anthropology (CA), Mostra de Artes (Sao Paulo, Brazil), ACVic Center for Contemporary Arts (Vic, Spain), UnionDocs (NY), BioBAT Art Space (NY), and Arsenal Gallery (NY). She has received grants from Brooklyn Arts Council, The Hudson River Foundation, Waterfront Alliance, and Brooklyn Community Foundation and has been an artist-in-residence at _gaia studio and the School of Making Thinking.

Wright holds a BA in American Studies from Yale and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. She is an Associate Professor of Communication and Media Arts at Marymount Manhattan College where she serves as Chair of the Division of Communication and Media Arts. She is a board member of New Media Caucus.
"You Are Getting Warmer" (2022) by Matthew López-Jensen
Matthew López-Jensen’s You Are Getting Warmer utilizes vinyl sandbags, an icon of storm surge and climate change, as a site for artistic intervention. The installation will appear, from a distance, to be long, colorful photograph of the coast. Viewers will approach the work to reveal the structure as sandbags and learn that the image is not just a “colorful” picture. The color is the heat signature of the landscape that represents the thermal energy of a stretch of New York City coastline threatened by sea level rise. The thermal image forces the viewer to see the impact of heat on the landscape and makes climate change visible in places where its impact can be overlooked or forgotten.
Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, photography, mapping, and social practice. His projects investigate the relationships between people and local landscapes. He was a recent artist-in-residence with the NYC Urban Field Station, is a Citizen Pruner, community gardener, and part of the New York City Urban Forest Task Force.

López-Jensen teaches environmental art and photography at Parsons School of Design at The New School and at Fordham University. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography and his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions. He received his MFA from the University of Connecticut and BA from Rice University.
"River Lab" (2022) by Mary Mattingly and contributing artists
Shaped like a drop of water, Mary Mattingly’s collaborative initiative River Lab is an interactive and “porous” structure that is in visual dialogue with the East River. When walking through, the city’s skyline and the East River can be seen through plants whose relatives once may have existed there like a portal into the seaport in deep time. The East River is a saltwater tidal estuary in NYC and provides an important natural resource. Contributing artists to River Lab offer tools for multiple ways of accessing the East River, exploring the water through senses: looking at the river on a molecular level through different lenses, drawing workshops, workshops with riparian plant dyes, sound experiences, and seeing foods grown from the cleaned river water. The installation will be activated on the weekends with programming by artists, students, ecologists and docents. During the weekdays, people can access multigenerational narratives and information about the East River’s indigenous and local lives.

Websites and social media:

Website: https://www.marymattingly.com/
Instagram: @marymattingly
Facebook: mary.mattingly.39
Mary Mattingly is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans large-scale public sculpture, ecological installation, collage-based photography, and social practice. Her practice centers on the relationships between bodies, water, and land. Mattingly focuses on these issues through the absurd, whether building an edible forest on a barge or bundling her possessions into boulders.

Mattingly is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the New York Public Library; and other public institutions. She is the founder of Swale (2016–2020), a floating food forest that drew over 340,000 visitors to New York City’s public piers and catalyzed the city’s first 24 hour edible public space. Mattingly’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Socrates Sculpture Park, the International Center of Photography, and Palais de Tokyo. Her work has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, and Le Monde.

2026

Art at the Water’s Edge

Where Art Meets Action

2026

2024

2023

2022

Power a Resilient Waterfront

Stronger Communities Start at the Water’s Edge